If I was a sensible gun owner, and I know a few, I’d be starting an organization focused on gun safety and showing that side of gun ownership and sport to the American people. I think we are all sick of the NRA. I know I am.

By the way, if you think you have your assault weapons to keep you safe from the police and the government… they have way more than you do. Blackhawk helicopters and shit. F-fucking 16s, they don’t give a rats ass about your AR15

I’d be all about saving the reputation of the sport because if we ever get a government that is not run from Russia and a wholly owned subsidiary of the NRA your second amendment “freedoms” are done.

Every day I’m more convinced it isn’t trump – he’s a simple idiot – I honestly think the entire GOP has become an arm of the Russian government.

As much as I loath Reagan this is not his party. It sure as Hell is not the party of Eisenhower.

The GOP we are experiencing today is here to rape and pillage and take away all they can.

While they are doing their work, in plain sight, Joe in the double-wide, busting his ass in the factory for beer money; busting his ass to pay off the pickup before it falls apart; busting his ass to pay for his kids medicine, is applauding and waving American flags.

Screaming #MAGA…

That America is gone Joe, so is your social security. Work until you die.

Every Democrat who works with these fascists is complicit too. It’s not just the GOP, it is the US government turned against us.

I wonder if men like Trump and Grassley have ever experienced true poverty. If they have ever spent even a few minutes with truly poor people. Deeply impoverished people see things from a perspective that is terrifyingly unique. These fascists have weaponized food.

You can’t deny it was palpable. It was in the air. We did incredibly stupid things – Vietnam and race riots, someone killed off the Kennedys and Dr. King, we did have Nixon – but we did some amazing things too.

We went to the moon! JFK challenged a bunch of math geeks and engineers and some guys with ”the right stuff” and we went to the goddamn moon.

It was like that then. Everything was a mess, but we still did some amazing stuff.

We were a dysfunctional family on our best day, but we we could do cool.

That sense, that thing in the air, has been missing.

Even the ”radicals” back then, if you talked one on one; the ones who opposed the system at every level. The guys who said the money could have been and maybe should have been spent to feed hungry people, or a million other causes, even those guys – I was one of those guys – had to admit these rocket men were pretty smart, amazing.

Again, and often, it was argued all that brain power could have been and maybe should have been better directed at more earthly causes. More human and humane causes.

But it was cool…

And the cool has died

Until the other day.

THIS is American greatness. Moving us forward with humility and humor.

The red Tesla circling the sun playing Bowie forever.

This is stuff that made us great.

Not lies and denials.

Not self-aggrandizing.

Not division and hate.

I watched that rocket take off and I felt something that was missing.

For a brief, fleeting moment I remembered what it used to feel like to be an American.

Maybe the truth is trump is who we are. Maybe Joe Kennedy and his flowery rhetoric is the lie, the lie we have all believed and believed in all our lives.

The lie was our hope. Our hope was the lie.

Maybe the ugliness of trump, his words, the lack of truth and integrity, his hatred of those not like him; maybe that is who we really are.

Maybe it isn’t America first, maybe it’s really me first.

Maybe Dr. King was the lie. Maybe we don’t give a shit about the content of a man’s character we care about his net worth.

Since last January 21st. I’ve had these thoughts. As I’ve watched trump and the fascists in Congress, now free to run unbridled, I’ve thought, many times, this is who we are. This is exactly who we are, free of the trappings of the illusion.

Joe Kennedy talked a good line. Pretty words. It made me want to pound my chest, but I know that isn’t who we are.

I heard a funny line from my cousin yesterday, “truth decay.” I’ve heard term “permanent decline.”

I’ve heard “permanent decline,” a lot…

Paul Ryan throwing around the word “cleansing” and no one bats an eye… does he even understand what that word has represented in the past century.

Fascists talking about “cleansing”

To be honest, it’s good for me to see these scumbags, all of them, exactly who and what they are.

Don’t think for a minute they’d not have us walking in chains were it not for a handful of protections held together by the illusion. Just give them time. Daily, behind the scenes, behind the dance of the clown, those protections are being torn down.

These fascists have always been here, campers, they are just out now, slithering in the sun and proudly running their game.

It has now lost even the desire to pretend anything it does is for the common good.

Capitalism is Fascism’s cousin. The world we see today didn’t simply happen. It’s the end result of a long, ugly, well planned and executed process.

You don’t need to be really smart, or well educated to understand what is going on today. You need to be able to read at a ninth or tenth-grade reading level. That’s the reading level that most newspapers and journalists aim for. You don’t need to be particularly bright, you need to be able to seek information and read and comprehend that information.

Fake news, whataboutism, these are tools of the fascist from the 1930s. I don’t care what your party affiliation is, I don’t care who you believe in who you don’t believe because there’s not a whole hell of a lot out there to actually believe in, but if you read and study just a little bit you will see exactly what is happening.

This is Webster’s definition of Fascism:
often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

Standing in line at the grocery store. A young woman with three young kids, panicking because she was $5 short buying groceries. It looked like food for her kids, not cigarettes and booze and movie tickets and the things Senator Grassley thinks poor people spend money on – frivolously…

I gave her $10, she cried and thanked me.

I don’t know why she was crying. The Dow just hit 25,000.

I’m talking to these guys last week, bringing home $350 a week, drowning in credit card debt. 10-year-old car with bad brakes, no health insurance, hungry kids, and misery.